Company
Date Published
Author
Roman Zavarnitsyn
Word count
530
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In Android applications, Sentry's UI Breadcrumbs feature automatically reports breadcrumbs for activity lifecycle events, system events, HTTP requests, and many more, providing context to errors without requiring developers to recreate the issue. Breadcrumbs are trails of events that occur before an error, containing rich metadata about the application state such as network requests, database queries, or UI events. The Sentry Android SDK version 5.6.0 or above captures breadcrumbs for different UI events like clicks, scrolls, and swipes, with useful metadata like view ID, class, and scroll direction. When an application crashes, it displays both existing breadcrumbs and the trace of UI events that occurred prior to the crash event. To customize this behavior, developers can use the BeforeBreadcrumbCallback or disable UI breadcrumbs through the Android manifest. The feature is already supported in most client SDKs and provides critical context to errors that a stack trace alone cannot provide.